Category: personal

i am beginning to reach a new and frightening stage in my life as a parent and as a minister. i’m about to be the parent of a teen – well actually a 6th grader because he won’t be thirteen for 2 ½ more years. still teen aged or not my oldest son will be moving into the 6th grade this summer and thus into the youth ministry. this scares me to death. i’m terrified just by the simple things that are already happening. i had forgotten how moody i was when i went through puberty. i had forgotten that i would cry, pout, get angry, laugh, and shout over things that aren’t really that important. now i get to watch it happen in my oldest son. in fact, it’s already happening.

intellectually i understand what’s happening and i know that there isn’t much i can do about it other than be understanding. yet emotionally i want to take care of all this for him and make everything alright. of course, i don’t have the ability to do this, but i would if i could. i’m not even experiencing some of the pre-teen

and teen issues that some parents are and it’s still bad. adam and i still have a great relationship with adam. he still talks to me and wants me around. i’m not going through anything really rough yet, except for a few new emotions. how am i ever going to make it through adam actually being a teen when i’m having such difficulty with him being a pre-teen.

as a minister a benefit has come out of this because i have new found emphaty and respect for the parents of teens. i understand some of the fear now and having to wonder which child i will see today – will it be the joyful child that takes everything in stride or will it be the child that thinks the world is out to get him? that helps me as a minister but it does absolutely nothing for me as a parent. really, as a youth minister how do i minister to the parent of a teen when that parent is me?

i’m not much of a protester. i do stand up for what i believe in and even try to make my views known to the powers that be on those matters – i write letters, send emails, and more on pretty much anything that cheapens human life (i.e death penalty, abortion, certain types of research, etc.) yet, i’m not the type of person who goes out looking for the next organization to boycott or next protest to be a part of.

with that said, i think i’ve run across an organization that i will begin to boycott until they begin to value humanity more. the business is taco bell. the reason i’m starting to boycott them is the coallaition of immokalee workers. the coalition of immokalee workers (ciw) is the organization that represents the tomato pickers for taco bell. the ciw is looking for a 1 penny raise from taco bell – they are still making the 1980 rate for picking tomatoes. that’s absurd! it wouldn’t cost taco bell much, if anything, to give this small raise.

in scripture the book of amos is all about justice. justice does not just mean the administration of law. no in the book of justice we find out that GOD defines justice as treating fairly those who have less power than you. justice means to protect the weak. therefore, i have to respond to taco bell. i’m not very powerful. i don’t have a mighty voice that corporations will listen to and be swayed by. all i have is a family, a ministry, a my own pigheadedness. but i will use what i have. i won’t eat at taco bell and my family has agreed to do the same thing. the only other thing i have is leadership within our youth ministry and using that i will not bring my teens to eat at a taco bell again until the ciw gets a raise. i have emailed taco bell and told them this.

even if it isn’t enough to make them change their minds right now, i will still not give my money or encourage my teens to give their money to an unjust company.

protect the weak!

i love wednesdays – i hate wednesday nights.

i love wednesdays and preparing for our youth worship service, the view. i love the constant work of getting everything ready. it’s a constant rush to make sure that everything is set for when we start the service. computer work has to be done, programs have to be printed, sound system equipment has to be put up and tested. there is always something else to do. i never have to wonder on wednesdays what i’m going to do next because there is always something else to do. even though we plan many parts of the service weeks ahead of time there is always something else that needs to be done.

i hate wednesday night because it’s over and now i begin to wonder. did GOD speak tonight, did i get in the way, did the kids “get it”, did i “get it, where we prepared enough? wednesday nights are when the questions begin to pour into my head. u start feeling pretty insecure concerning what we’ve done. i begin to ask why more people didn’t say something about the service or why so many people did say something. i start to wonder and there don’t seem to be any immediate answers to the questions that keep running through my head. the answers won’t come until later in the week.

i kind of wish that i could always just keep preparing for the view and never actually finish it. then i wouldn’t have to go through wednesday nights.

tonight at the view we celebrated sukkot – the jewish feast of booths. we’ve been dealing with the days of awe. we’ve approached the tradition from the angle of understanding why the forefathers of our faith celebrate as they do, and what parts of those celebrations point to CHRIST. the series ended tonight.

the new church budget year is about to begin (friday, october 1st) and this means that i can buy a new laptop. i used to have a laptop that was 4 1/2 years old. it’s was a compaq presario 1200-xl119 and it really worked fine. i would still be using it if it wasn’t for the fact that the power plug-in broke. i tried to have it fix but when they told me it was going to cost $650 i decided it might be time for a new computer. it’s amazing to me that i can buy this small little part for about $10 to $15 but it costs $600 to have it put in. it’s a great, big, stupid world.

the problem with buying a new laptop is that our ministry has now entered the video age. because of this i have to consider video editing when i look at a laptop. this changes the standards for the laptops that i consider. now after a great deal of research i have finally ordered one. it’s an apple powerbook:

• 15″ screen
• 1.33 ghz cpu
• 512 meg ram
• 64 meg ati radeon video
• 80 gig hard drive.
• dvd/cd-rw

since i order an apple i did of course also purchase finalcut express 2. i am very excited about getting my hands on this. this is going to offer me mny more features than pinnacle studio 9 does and i was able to get it for only $99.

right now it should arrive in baton rouge on friday, october 8, 2004. of course, i leave for the national youth worker convention on the 7th so i’ll probably miss it.

let me be transparent for a moment – i hate the word transparent, i’m fed up with people saying that they are being real, and i think i’ll puke the next time someone tells me that they are genuine. current catch phrases that’s all they are. they’re the words that are current right now and ministers, speakers, and other various youth worker wannabes say them so they will sound good. but to me they’re basically just words with very little meaning behind them.

the reason i think this is because i actually do have a theory on being “real” – kind of ironic isn’t it. my theory is this – we are most real when we admit how fake we are. we are all pretty much a bunch of posers. i screw up regularly and i want to keep those screw ups as well hidden as possible. even though possibly the best thing that could happen to me would be for you to know each of my sins so that i would no longer have to pretend, that’s not what i want to happen. i want to hide my sin and keep on pretending like i’m perfect. i am one very fake person. in fact, i am so fake that when i begin to become “transparent” i am usually thinking in the back of my mind about how secure in myself i am to let people see my weaknesses. i’m not secure. i’m pathetic.

the good news for me is that i’m not alone. i’m surrounded by pathetic people. people who desperately want to be “real” but don’t know how to because we are so completely fake. in my heart i want to live the life of the velveteen rabbit but in my mind i don’t want to go through all the pain and anguish of getting rid of all the layers of fakeness within my life. what if under all those layers of “fakeness” i find out there’s nothing real in the center – the equivalent of a fake onion, simply made up of layers.

thankfully JESUS loves fake people if only we recognize that we are fake. hypocrites don’t realize that they are posers, hypocrites think that they are “real”. JESUS loves fake people who understand how “unreal” they are. one day JESUS will take all of us “posers” and make us real.

i’m not trying to offer up a cheap, little, sunday-school answer here. i’m not trying to just cover a very difficult problem with the simply phrase “but JESUS will take care of things in the end.” i know life has difficult problems and the answers to these problems aren’t easy. it’s just that there’s not another answer to the problem of how fake we are. if JESUS doesn’t love us as a group of wannabes then we are all basically out of luck. there’s nothing else we can do about it. none of us are real enough to find an answer to our fakitivity (my wife’s word). either JESUS loves us in spite of our fakeness and helps us to become real or we’re doomed to live and die in a world that only pretends to be genuine

so let me be as transparent as i can be – there is nothing transparent about me. i am so fake that i even trick myself into believing that i’m being real. yet there is still hope for me. that hope is found in the only ONE WHO is real.

am i as clear as mud?

julian of norwich was an anchoress and a mystic (1340 – 1426). during her “first showing” she saw all that had been “made” as a little object sitting in her hand. it was only about the size of the hazelnut. she was amazed by how fragile it look and bewildered that it could survive. looking upon it she made the following statement:

in this little thing the (“hazelnut of everything that has been ‘made'”) i saw three properties. the first is that GOD made it, the second that GOD loveth it, the third that GOD keepeth it. but what is to me verily the MAKER, the KEEPER, and the LOVER – i cannot tell; for till i am substantially oned to HIM, i may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till i be so fastened to HIM, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my GOD and me.

God:

• made me
• loves me
• keeps me

i’m not sure that it can get much better than that. now if i could only remember that this is true and live based on it.

i spent a wonderful day with my family – tossing the football, wrestling with my kids, eating at the table, taking noah to a birthday party, etc. it was a great day.

pam and i were going to go to a yom kippur service tonight at one of the local synagogues. we were really looking forward to it because we are both very interested in the hebrew faith. i have nothing but profound respect for judaism.

we wanted to make sure that it would be okay for us to visit the service, since it is a very important service, and we wanted to find out if there were any customs that we needed to know about before coming to the service. so i called the synagogue.

when i asked if the service was open to the public the secretary said “you mean to … like … non-jews?”

“yep, i’m a gentile”

she said “i’ll have to ask”

so she put me on hold and went to ask. she then came back and said it would be a minute longer. the second time she came back she said it would be okay for us to come to the service but that the ushers would probably have alot of questions for us. i told her that would be fine and then asked if there were any customs that we needed to know about. she told me, “no, but the ushers probably will have alot of questions.”

needless to say i didn’t feel very welcomed.

now i know from my past that this is not true of all synagogues. growing up i had a fair number of jewish friends who took me to synagogue every time i spent the night with them. their synagogue was always open and welcoming. from this i know that this unwelcoming spirit has nothing to do with the jewish faith and everything to do with the people in the building. there are unwelcoming CHRISTians who operate churches that feel just like the synagogue i spoke with.

i just can’t understand why a church that worships the “most high GOD” would not be excited about others joining them. it makes no sense to me that you would not relish the opportunity to share the worship of the “LORD of hosts” with others. yet this synagogue was like this and many CHRISTian churches are like this too. how can we not welcome strangers when we know that they bear the image of our LORD in their flesh?

it scares me to think of the times i have been unwelcoming.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Channel 4 to screen ‘Priest Idol’

LONDON -With the working title Priest Idol, the show will give a vicar 12 months to boost the church’s turnout. Backed by advisors, the vicar will be able to spend an undisclosed sum of money on anything he or she thinks will appeal to parishioners. Being filmed in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, the three-part series is due to be broadcast at the end of 2005.

have we as the church really fallen down this low? have we truly reached a point where we are reduced to doing this in order to revive lagging attendance at our churches?

please say it ain’t so.

what happened to the hope that we have to offer this world? what has happened to the freedom that we have to offer the world? are these, and the other amazing joys of following CHRIST, not enough to grow a church? do we really now have to hold contests and bring in television cameras into our churches in order to stir us to reach out to a sick and dying world?

please say it ain’t so!